European anti-terror plan wants 42 pieces of data from air travelers

Passengers flying to and from Europe will now be forced to submit a long list of personal details, which can be stored for up to five years. The counter-terrorism plan would record data such as meal preferences and how many flights someone has missed.

The directive has been introduced by the European Commission and
requires air travelers to fill in 42 separate pieces of
information. Some of the fields would not cause too many eyebrows
to be raised, such as nationality or frequent flyer information.
Others, such as meal preference or the number of one-way tickets
bought are slightly more puzzling, the Guardian reports.

The information would be stored for five years and would be given
to security personnel upon demand. The European Commission says
the move is necessary in order to help combat terrorism and has
been championed by interior ministers across the EU. The
ministers came to a consensus while they were gathered in Paris,
for the ‘Je suis Charlie’ March that introducing the measure was
imperative to tackle terrorism concerns.

The ministers issued a joint statement saying there was a
“crucial and urgent need to move toward a European passenger
name record system,” and immediate progress will be on the
agenda when EU interior ministers meet in Riga on Thursday,
according to the Guardian special report.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, vice chairman of the European parliament’s
civil liberties committee, was scathing saying: “The
commission plans are an affront to the critics of the European
Parliament and the European Court of Justice who have said that
data retention without any link to a certain risk or suspicion
isn’t proportionate.”

“It is an open breach of fundamental rights to blanketly
retain all passenger data,” he added. “Instead of a full
take of PNR [passenger name record] data, we need a focus on
suspects and risk flights. The Paris attacks have shown that mass
retention was not effective in fighting jihadis.”

European Commission wants 42 items of personal info from
passengers flying through Europe for security. Would you be
comfortable with this?

“The proposed surveillance of all travelers is a symbolic
measure on the cost of EU citizens’ civil liberties and effective
security,” Albrecht, who is an MEP with the German Green
Party, said, which was reported by the Guardian.

However, Timothy Kirkhope, a Conservative member of the European
Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee, believes it is possible
to find a consensus to push through the revised proposal.

“I want an agreement that safeguards lives and liberties by
offering stronger data protection rules whilst also making it
much harder for a radicalized fighter to slip back into Europe
undetected,” he said earlier this month.

“EU heads of government and home affairs ministers would not
ask for this agreement unless there was a clear and present need
for it,” he added, as reported by the Guardian.

Please support my PNR proposals ; on the table for nearly three
years! We must give EU citizens more protection pic.twitter.com/dJEKhXzOnn

The decision by the European Commission would signal a U-turn
from a decision made by the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties
Committee in April 2013, which rejected the European Commission’s
proposal for the recoding of Passenger Name Record (PNR) data.
The Civil Liberties committee said that airlines should collect
PNR data, during check-in. In 2011, the European Commission
wanted air carriers to provide EU countries with the data of
passengers, who were entering or leaving the EU.

Some adjustments have been made to the 2011 directive, such as
introducing stricter conditions for accessing passenger records
and its possible transfer to a third party country, while also
giving travelers better information about how to access their
data and request modifications.